Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Template-Dependent Ordering of Path-Complete Lyapunov Methods

In the context of discrete-time switched systems, we study the comparison of stability certificates based on path-complete Lyapunov methods. A characterization of this general ordering has been provided recently, but we show here that this characterization is too strong when a particular template is considered, as it is the case in practice. In the present work we provide a characterization for templates that are closed under pointwise minimum/maximum, which covers several templates that are often used in practice. We use an approach based on abstract operations on graphs, called lifts, to highlight the dependence of the ordering with respect to the analytical properties of the template. We finally provide more preliminary results on another family of templates: those that are closed under addition, as for instance the set of quadratic functions.